Cling to your narratives

The BrainFog anti-pattern will be your October 7

Photo by Azizi Co

I’m getting older

I’m getting older. I spent my whole life sitting around in one crummy joint after another with a bunch of punks like you, drinking coffee, eating hash, and watching other people take off for Florida while I got to sweat how the hell I’m going to pay the plumber next week.

– On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

Intro

Since October 7 - I am suspicious of narratives.

This week - I talk about what often happens after a successful product launch, first customers and expanding sales operations.

The BrainFog anti-pattern may become your October 7.

When you expand and no one wants your product - and you cling to your narrative like an infant’s security blanket - then it’s time to flip the BrainFog bit.

BrainFog

I had a case of brain fog the past couple months.

After a successful launch of OpenCRO 4 months ago, I made a classic founder mistake: expand before nailing positioning.

Afflicted with over-confidence - after 40+ medical device projects and 14 successful FDA submissions - I figured I knew the answers.

The world moves 100x faster than the answers in your narrative.

And it’s easy to get distracted by the fast-moving world around you.

And when you start expanding and no one wants your product - and you still believe in your answers - then it’s time to flip the BrainFog bit.

What is the BrainFog anti-pattern?

BrainFog is not being 100% confident about what your product does, why you’re doing this, who your customers are, why they care, and when they might buy your product if they do care about it at some point in time.

When we have BrainFog - we forget the first lesson of marketing by David Ogilvy - “positioning comes first”.

Positioning is not a bunch of strategy sessions, decks and documents you generate with ChatGPT.

Positioning is simple - like this:

Positioning is “What does my product do, and who it is for”.

Why is BrainFog an anti-design pattern?

By not answering those 2 questions, you guarantee failure.

How to clear out BrainFog

Force yourself to state your positioning in 10 words or less.

Pitch another human with your positioning and listen carefully to what they say.

I like to tell clients that the best test of a positioning statement is to pitch a 9 year old.

9 year olds are smart, brutally honest and haven’t been brain-washed by the system yet.

I pitched a human who is a professional sports coach. Brutally honest with me.

This helped me clear out my brain fog and reset my positioning.

Like this:

Risk Analysis for AI-enabled medical devices

Then you can explain in a bit more detail like this:

OpenCRO identifies the cyber and privacy risks most likely to impact revenue, regulatory approval, reputation, and patient safety.

And then you can price and package your offer.

Like this

What I’ve done here is called productizing a service.

Or what’s now called in the post-AI age - ‘service as software’.

Unlike traditional consulting where you pay for billable hours - here you pay a fixed price for a fixed outcome.

I can afford to do that because after I do a 2 hour workshop with a client, OpenCRO agents do the grunt work of to build and analyze threat models and write reports.

You can see 4 pillars - each pillar builds on the previous pillar. It’s additive.

The entry pillar ‘Foundation’ looks suspiciously cheap compared to the top level pillar ‘Assure’.

That’s by design.

I want customers to give OpenCRO a spin before committing a larger budget.

So what do I do now?

There's security theater and there’s risk mitigation.

AI-enabled devices clear cleanly when the risk analysis is clean.

Invest 30 minutes and I'll show you clean.